On Friday evening, partly as a small gesture of defiance to the terrorists, I went to a subdued West End for an evening of theatre. By pure chance (it was the only show I found starting at 8pm and I was running late – why DO most theatres start their shows so early?) I ended up seeing Elmina’s Kitchen, happily, since I might easily otherwise have missed it.

Set in Hackney, east London, it is entirely played in the eponymous cafe, where a black father, Deli, is trying to deal with his failing business, his son’s fall into the hands of his old friend, a Yardie gangster, his brother’s release from prison, and his own father’s attempt to sponge off him, after decades of absence.

Shakespearean is an adjective that might well be applied to this beautifully structured work: in its effective transition between slapstick comedy and genuine tragedy, in its dramatic but entirely believable ending (which I won’t give away), and its lively, witty language of the street, the comparison with the Bard is warranted.

The playing is uneven: Shaun Parkes as the gangster Digger exudes menace, George Harris as Deli’s sleazy father and Dona Croll as the saucy waitress whose motivations are complex and perhaps nefarious, are all excellent; Croll particularly holds the stage, but Kwame Kwei-Armah, the author of the piece, doesn’t seem to me to live up to being the best-known actor here (perhaps it is significant know for TV). He doesn’t quite force you to look at him the way he should.

Nonetheless, the production is gripping, despite the fact that the language is entirely that of the street, and this viewer certainly missed some details in the dialect. I’m still trying to work out an insult/swear word that sounded something like “blood cloot” that occurred several times – can anyone translate? A black woman in the foyer at interval was amused when I commented that the programme should have a glossary, but really I wasn’t joking.

It is salutary that this is a language of London with which I’m entirely unfamiliar. The play also addresses many issues that I read about only in newspapers: the problems in the black Caribbean community of maintaining relations between fathers and sons, the attractions of crime, and guns, and the general seductiveness of violence, yet it is never preachy or driven by its “issues”: this is a story, not a piece of social work.

But it was great to see the audience was about half Black, and mostly young, which is certainly not what you usually see in the West End. The (all white) ushers in their bow ties looked rather uncomfortable and out of place.

But if the West End is to survive this is an audience it needs to attract, and for the actors it is a wonderful audience – far noisier, more reactive and lively than the average; it must have been rather like that in the Elizabethan Globe.

(The Guardian’s view is here.)

* The play has also, I found, been filmed by the BBC and is available on video.

I just came across a reference to this fascinating sounding article …

“How does she do that?’ Belly Dancing and the Horror of a Flexible Woman”
VIRGINIA KEFT-KENNEDY
University of Wollongong, NSW Australia
Abstract: The role of belly dance and the meanings attached to this dance for both the women who perform it and their spectators have undergone radical change since it was first introduced to the West in the 19th century. This article raises a series of questions about the process of bodily transformation through the practice of belly dance and explores the mechanisms by which women attain empowerment through the moving body. In particular, the complex intersections between ideas of display, spectacle, and the “grotesque” moving body are examined.

It is from Women’s Studies, Volume 34, Number 3-4 / April-June 2005, pp. 279-300.

It don’t have online access, but it sounds like a fascinating article; when you think about it men always seem to look uncomfortable around belly dancers – at least the Western men I’ve seen. It’s quite an aggressive form of movement.

* I’ve been remiss in neglecting to point to the latest Carnivalesque (a collection of posts on early modern history). I particularly liked the early sexual harassment case”, which perhaps unsurprisingly saw the “victim” transported to Australia, but check it out – the range is so broad you’re almost bound to find something in your range of interests.

* Seeking inspiration for a radical career change? Here it is.

* Bloggers and professional journalists co-operating? Surely not. The Washington Post sees a new trend in the role of “citizen journalism” in the London bombings.

* You’ll remember the huge health scare about hormone-replacement therapy. But a high percentage of women, for good reasons, are going back on the treatment, and there were anyway flaws in the study. A sensible report on the issue here

* Item No. 3,254 to add to my two read list, The Wilder Shores of Love, by Lesley Blanch – not some bodice-ripper, but an account of four 19th-century women travellers by the delightfully adventurous writer and journalist Lesley Blanch, who’s still going strong at the age of 101. There was an excellent article in the Guardian review.

* Echidne of the Snakes has an interesting theory on why small numbers of women can appear to assume prominence well beyond their numbers in otherwise male-dominated areas of society.

… is a cycle “computer”, so-called, although that’s a rather grand term for a £7 item that works on the simple principle of a magnet on a front spoke passing a detector fixed to the fork. You tell it the size of your wheel; it works out how far and how fast you’ve gone.

But the “speedo” as I prefer to call it (that means speedometer, for those who need the translation from Australian) has provided me with hours of amusement.

First, it allowed me to calculate the shortest route for my new commute – 6.7 miles home from South Quay, through Shadwell (on nights when I’m feeling brave – I’ve only had a rock thrown at me once), past Bank Tube, then along New Oxford St in the bus lane and straight up Tottenham Court Road.

The longest option is around the Regent’s Canal (daytime only of course), which is 8 miles – I keep meaning to do it, but it does take about 10 minutes longer and I live in a perpetual condition of running late, so I seldom get to it. (In fact I’ve done it once, but the wild birds etc were lovely, and I must do it more often.)

Second, it has allowed me to check my top speed, which until the weekend was 16mph. About that point in London I start getting nervous about stray pedestrians, dogs etc and my stopping distance, but on the weekend adventure I actually got up to 22mph! Yes I know that’s standing still in serious cyclist terms, but it felt pretty fast to me – and the bike felt about as unstable as I fancy, for the moment anyway.

So, my recommendation is: if you’ve got a bike, get one of these! (In fact I regret not lashing out on one of the more expensive ones, which have a tripmeter. Mine is only cumulative, so you have to remember the starting distance on each journey to calculate its length.)

They’ve cancelled the softball and baseball in the 2012 Olympics, so Regent’s Park won’t be ripped up for the purpose of building a huge temporary stadium. I withdraw some of my earlier cumudgeoning (although not all of it – the Games are still bound to cost a mint and cause lots of disruption).

I expected to wake in agony this morning, after cycling 25 miles (40km) through the Kent countryside yesterday – nearly double what I’ve ever done in one day before – but was pleasantly surprised to find my hamstrings unknotted and my heels touching the ground. Maybe I’ll pay tomorrow.

Whatever agony might result, it was in a good cause – I’m now much clearer on a range of architectural terms that I’ve been reading in guides for years, have acquired lots of new thoughts about medieval society – and all of that exercise, albeit balanced out by a huge cheddar ploughman’s lunch and some lovely local cider. (Well you’ve got to go with the theme.)

The occasion was a Lambeth Cyclists architectural tour of the Kentish Weald, which I found on the London Cycling Campaign Rides and Events listing. (You can also sign up for email reminders.)

We started in Headcorn, with the classical wooden hall house known as the Headcorn Manor House, behind the church. Built around 1500 as a vicarage, it must have been a near-palace in medieval terms – with fine filagree decorating the windows of the central great hall, lit by double-height bay windows. (Hey it even had a chimney in the hall, whereas with earlier versions there’d just been a hole in the middle to let the smoke out. Brick was still a high-status item, so this was pure luxury.)

Here, as we were told by our delightfully patient guide and knowledgeable guide, Benedict O’Looney, that the hall had later typically been split by a floor at its middle level, providing extra space. This style of wonderfully organic wood-framed house was the main subject of the ride, a reminder of the great oak forests that once graced the area, and the rich yeomen families that lived in them. (Typical of the sort of house is Sewards, here well, if technically, described.)

Another theme of the day was the wonderful range of reds to be found in the bricks and tiles of Tudor Kent, well illustrated by the run of houses beside the church of St Peter and St Paul. Tiles were hung on the side of houses, as well as being used on the roof, to protect them from the elements, as well as for decorative effect. (Between 1784 and 1850 when roof tiles were taxed there was lots of tile hanging – you can imagine the arguments about the definition of “roof”.)

Here too we first encountered a delightful architectural term – the “cats-slide roof”, referring to the extension of a hipped roof down, sometimes almost to ground-level, when an extension was built on the side of a house, producing that extended line the must also sometimes have been a delight for adventurous children. Continuing the animal theme, we were later to learn about the “dragon beam” – the great curved piece that supports the jetties of the upper story at the corners.

(There’s some lovely historical snippets about Headcorn, and pictures of the church, here.)

After a detour to the pie shop – highly and deservedly recommended – next it was the short ride to Smarden, where after a stop for that ploughman’s in a lovely pub garden with pond – where we appropriated all the seats, to the disgust of the locals, we visited the church of St Peter, which lives up to its nickname of “the barn of Kent” with a huge, beautifully light and airy nave.

Smarden’s a funny place, for in the 1330s, when it was granted market privileges by Edward III, it was obviously a boomtown – also the time they built the church – but something went wrong, the traffic went the wrong way, and now it is just a little – if richly architecturally-endowed – village.

Curiosities included the entrance to the churchyard – which requires you to walk under someone’s first-storey bedroom; the wafer-oven in the chancel: no need to worry about the town baker falling down on the job; and the dragons’ house – featuring a line of the creatures lined along the fascia board. “Are they breathing fire?” someone asked of the arrows that separated them. Close study revealed, no, they were farting it. (A medieval builder’s sense of humour perhaps?)

Also in Smarden we were initiated into the difference between Flemish bond and English bond, with regard to the arrangement of headers and stretchers: if you want to sound really knowledgable, while guaranteeing your audience will not understand you, here’s a page that explains it all.

The sun came out about now – after some threatening morning clouds, in time to warm the trip on to Bethersden, famous locally for its “marble”, from which was made the rather battered font in St Margaret’s, although not the “moronic corbel” idenitifed by our invaluable guide Mr Pevsner, which we eventually found outside the church. It did look rather like a person’s suffering from Down’s Syndrome, to give it a more comfortable modern label.

This was where the riding got going, and we made a serious run (well by my standards) on to Woodchurch, with a view stop at a windmill with a lovel view and some friendly local horses – the piebald definitely fancied trying out our water bottles.

Then on towards Appledore, on the Romney Marsh – away from all that lovely Kentish clay. We’d been promised a lovely long downhill, but it was more of an undulating run. My London flat-bits-only cycling legs just about coped with one long uphill, although several members of the party went past as though I was standing still.

I’d learned a lot, although we didn’t resolve several questions debated through the day: why were so many fine houses built in each village, when you might expect only one manor in each? what was the open passageway between the great hall and the service rooms for? and why did they jetty out the first storey on houses in country villages where space was not at the premium that it was in London?

Answers in the comments please …